John Crowe Ransom - (1888-1974)
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Tennessee State University, Tennessee
I. Introduction
Ransom, an American poet, critic and man of letters, was a major proponent of new Criticism. Like most southern writers of his period, his principal theme was the decay of southern lifestyles, beliefs and integrity. John Crowe Ransom, a member of the Fugitive group at Vanderbilt University, is known for his poetry, which allows for individual readers' interpretation.
II. Biography
John Crowe Ransom was born on April 30, 1888 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the next to the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls, of John James Ransom and the former Ella Crowe. Throughout his boyhood he lived in succession of small towns in central Tennessee as his father, a Methodist minister, moved from one congregation to another. His family was deep-rooted within the South and Ransom's granduncle had been a founder and member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ransom attended the Bowen School in Nashville, graduating in 1903. At the age of fifteen he entered Vanderbilt University, which at the time he majored in Latin and Greek studies. Ransom later majored in classics and philosophy until, in the fall of 1905, a shortage of funds force him to interrupt his studies at Vanderbilt University for two years of high school teaching. He returned to Vanderbilt in June 1907, graduating in 1909 with a B.A. degree and the University's Founder's Medal, its highest academic honor. The following year Ransom received a Rhodes Scholarship that sent him to Christ Church College, Oxford.
At Christ Church College, Ransom met another American student, Christopher Morley, who introduced modern poetry to Ransom, which he became acquainted and interested. Nevertheless he was elected to read classics and philosophy at Oxford, not literature, and he completed the course, graduating in 1913 with his second BA degree. "I always expected to teach for a living and write for fun and fame" (Current Biography pg. 364). Later on he began his career as a Latin teacher at the Hotckiss School in Connecticut. Ransom then became interested in contemporary literature.
In 1914, when a vacancy occurred in the English Department at Vanderbilt, Ransom returned to be an instructor. Ransom had planned on teaching at Vanderbilt for twenty-three years, becoming the professor of English in 1927 and gaining Vanderbilt a national reputation as a center of English Studies. An interruption came in his life in March 1917, when Ransom went off to officer's training camp, emerging three months later as a first lieutenant. In the fall of 1919 Lieutenant Ransom was released from the Army, and in the same year Christopher Morley secured the publication of Ransom's first book of verse.
Poems About God (Holt, 1919) was immature and technically crude, but the collection impressed Robert Graves as well as Morley, and a few reviewers recognized its promise. Ransom then continued his poems to The Fugitive which were collected in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927) (Current Biography pg. 365).
After being released from the army, Ransom married Robb Reavill on December 22, 1920. They have a daughter, Helen and two sons, David and John. Ransom was a member of Kappa Sigma and Phi Beta Kappa and served as the Library of Congress as Honorary Consultant in American Letters.
III. Awards and Honors
In 1951, he received both the Russell Loines Memorial Fund Prize, given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Bolingen Prize, given by the Yale University Library. In 1962 he was warded the Fellowship prize of the academy of American Poets, and in 1964 he was given the National Book Award for poetry.
IV. Literary Works
John Ransom was an inspiration in the "Agrarianism" embraced by some distinguished Southerners in the 1930's and he gave the movement its first notice in God Without Thunder. Ransom, being an Agrarian, never organized himself into an active movement, however, and although they wrote and lectured for a cause, the filminess of their coarse utopia was demonstrated when the depression laid waste to the Agrarian South. Losing interest in public affairs, Ransom concentrated deeply on aesthetics in his later works. The agrarian image is of the kind of life, in which convenience, grace, courtesy can exist in harmony with thought and action, making an individual life suitable.
When Ransom writes of nature, it is almost never as wilderness, but as farmland. His agrarianism is of old Southern Plantation, the gentle, mannered life of leisure and refinement without the need or indication to pioneer. The necessity for order and stability is uppermost in Ransom's world. His poems reflect his abhorrence of disorder; they are full of violence, bloodshed gore. "The violence is always presented with mannered gentility, a sense of chivalric decorum in language, that serves only to underscore and emphasize the terror of the action" (Vol4 pg. 428).
Ransom's major works consist of Chills and Fever, Grace after Meat, God without Thunder, Poems About God, The Fugitive, The Kenyon Critics and Selected Poems. Within his third edition of Selected Poems I'll be discussing the style and structure of the "Necrological" and the "Equilibrists." His styles within both of these poems were very vague because there was not a direct meaning in the poems.
Both of these poems in my opinion were not of great speech. "The vagueness about the narrator of which the critic complains in 'Equilibrists' is due really to the fact that there is no narrator at all, that is no speaker distinct from the poet" (Vol4. Pg. 431). The ending of "Necrological" seems vague because the friar cannot assimilate all he has experienced. He has learned how little value one human being places on the life of another, how precarious human life is. He has learned, too, of how predictable the world is. A stallion dies because he is the origin.
Most of all he has learned of human love when he sees the laymen who has endured "all men's pleasantries and even given up her life so that she might be near the one she loves. The friar is so deeply engrossed in thought that he is like the dead bodies of the knights in whom only the vultures seem interested. The friar learns that the human body, to which he has given little consideration before, is more than a mere depository for the soul and that there is a kind of love very difficult from the adoration he feels for his blesses lord." (DLB pg. 45)
However, the "Equilibrists" are beautiful in their externally appearance and undenied love, the friar in "Necrological" becomes one of the slain soldiers not realizing the importance of the human body and soul. Ransom's stanza structure was very easy to follow. Within his poems Ransom uses metaphors for comparison. He incorporates visual aids to assist the audience in capturing what was written. "The metaphor is Ransom's favorite figure of speech, and the study of his use of it provides a good deal of understanding of his poetic techniques and achievements. The metaphor, is the Aclimatic figure," is overwhelmingly his characteristic figure of comparison (Vol4 pg. 428).
In the "Equilibrists," Ransom gives the nature of the world in which we live an expectation
of the one to come by underscoring the plight of the doomed lovers and composing the epitaph to memorize the doom:
Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;
Close, but untouching in each other's sight;
Mouldered the lips and ashy the fall skull.
Let them lie perilous and beautiful. (DLB pg. 385)
Ransom's final attitude towards the lovers in the epitaph in identifying their attitude was neither Heaven nor Hell.
John Crowe Ransom a native of Pulaski, Tennessee reached the goals he had set out in life after graduating high school. The American poet went through trials and tribulations to build his respect as a poet. Yet, Ransom's voice is entirely his own, his angle of vision is essentially comic. The land, which he loves, has been so long in disorder that the right hierarchy can hardly be hoped for.
This essay was submitted by a student of Judith Broadbent, a teacher at Tennessee State University, in Tennessee.